Month: October 2017

This is an invitation to join the Grandview Woodland Food Connection and Raise the Rates’ Annual Welfare Food Challenge in November 2017. The Challenge is for one week, eating only what can be purchased with the money a welfare recipient receives.

The Challenge highlights the inadequacy of welfare rates in BC. Even with the $100/month raise implemented by the new BC government, this amount is not enough. A single person receives only $710/month, which provides only $19/week for food. With the rising cost of rent, lack of rent control, exorbitant cost of living in the city, this is only $1 more per week than the Challenge in 2016. Raise the Rates, and the Grandview Woodland Food Connection are working to raise public awareness of the extreme poverty of people on welfare; and how there needs to be more action and commitment to see rates raised so people on welfare can live with dignity.

The Challenge will start on Wednesday November 1st and run for a full 7 days. Participants will be expected to live on only the food they can purchase with $19 dollars. This calculation is based on the expectation that welfare recipients will have to pay rent and damage deposit, bus tickets and cell phone (necessary to look for work and contact the welfare office) and personal hygiene. Out of $710 there is still very little money left for food.

To help publicize the Challenge, we are inviting you to join with the Grandview Woodland Food Connection and together we hope to document and publicize our experiences. This could include:

Another spectacular Wild Salmon Caravan Mardi Gras style parade with drumming, regalia, costumes, floats, signs, banners and more, which all express in celebration our love for and deep concern to protect Wild Salmon. Led by the Salish Matriarchs, the parade started at the Native Friendship Centre and walked up Commercial Drive to Trout lake where a salmon ceremony was held at the lake then followed by an amazing salmon feast, speakers, and performances.

This Rainbow Parade in Vancouver launches the Wild Salmon Caravan and its third annual journey which will follow the wild salmon from the Salish Seas to Secwepemcul’ecw territory, stoping at several communities along the way. The Caravan will be led this year by Salish matriarchs from Indigenous communities all along the route from Vancouver to the Adams River.

The Oct. 7-12 Caravan will honour and celebrate the spirit of wild salmon with festive parades, ceremonies, traditional feasts and music in Coastal and Interior Salish communities including Vancouver, Chilliwack, Merritt, Kamloops and Chase.

The Grandview Woodland Food Connection is an organizing partner and honored to be a part of this event, recognizing that salmon are a critical food justice issue, in particular, for its importance to Indigenous people and a whole host of other species that depend on salmon for their survival. Supporting the protection of wild salmon is an important reconciliation action towards ensuring a stronger Indigenous land and food system. To this end, we must step up our support for and with Indigenous peoples in their struggle to save the salmon, including working towards an end to open pen fish farms, overfishing, oil pipelines, and a host of other environmental threats to salmon.

Britannia School gardening kicks off another school garden year with a seed saving workshop. Also had fun digging up potatoes and harvesting other food that one class made into a large veggie stew. This year we are working with three classes (Outreach Alternate, Streetfront Alternate, and Bio 11) and about 60 students. Big thanks to recent funding from Seeds of Change Canada and Evergreen that is helping to support our garden program.

Contact

Email: gwfcnetwork@gmail.com

Tel: 604-718-5895

Honoring Coast Salish Lands and Water

We recognize that we live and work on unceded Coast Salish land and serve many Indigenous communities who live in our neighbourhood. We believe that those of us who are settlers on this land have a deep responsibility to address colonial systems of power and oppression, most importantly as they impact Indigenous people and their food systems today. It is through this understanding that we are working to develop a decolonization framework through which all our future programs will be planned and implemented.